


Rhythm of the War Drums

by HyperLittleNori (Shiguresan)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alpha Peter Hale, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Werewolves Are Known, Angst with a Happy Ending, Animalistic Behaviour, Dystopia, Feral Peter Hale, Feral behaviour, Gladiator Peter, M/M, Omega Stiles Stilinski, Omega Verse, Scenting, Slave Stiles Stilinski, dystopian au, feral Werewolves, overprotective Peter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 15:48:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20392192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shiguresan/pseuds/HyperLittleNori
Summary: The foreboding song of the drums rumbled through the stands above, made his heart, his blood pound with their increasing rhythm. He’d seen this so many times now, heard the sickening, morbid excitement of the rabble. He readied himself for the carnage, but even nearly a year after he’d first stood in this spot, it still filled him with dread.As always, he watched the sandy arena through the barred steel gates. They vibrated with the movement, with the almost deafening sounds of the crowd and the drums. A sea of guards stood at his back, but they were not there for him…





	Rhythm of the War Drums

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Faladrast (surfgirl1)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/surfgirl1/gifts).

> Inspired by the [ manip ](https://faladrast.tumblr.com/post/180555746189/oh-alpha-my-alpha-by-faladrast-lyrics-are-from)by the wonderful Faladrast. I promised this to you months ago, so sorry this was late and thank you for all your lovely photo manips. I think you were one of the first people in this fandom to reach out to me when I posted my first Teen Wolf fic and it meant the world to me. Thank you for being so kind, I hope you like the story!
> 
> **Also, side note:** It’s never really said how old everyone is, but I imagine Stiles has just turned 18 as he’s just reached adulthood before he meets Peter. So no underage here.

  


The foreboding song of the drums rumbled through the stands above, made his heart, his blood pound with their increasing rhythm. He’d seen this so many times now, heard the sickening, morbid excitement of the rabble. He readied himself for the carnage, but even nearly a year after he’d first stood in this spot, it still filled him with dread.

As always, he watched the sandy arena through the barred steel gates. They vibrated with the movement, with the almost deafening sounds of the crowd and the drums. A sea of guards stood at his back, but they were not there for him, not to stop him or save him. They were there for the one trapped behind another gate on the opposite side of the arena, reinforced with mountain ash.

Stiles couldn’t see him, but he knew he was there. He felt him.

Suddenly, the foreboding melody of the drums died, as abruptly as a soldier cut down in the midst of battle. Stiles watched through the bars of his own prison as the gates on the far side lifted. A huge, grotesquely twisted shape barrelled out onto the sand, naked save for a tattered pair of trousers. He was half-shifted, a horrifying mix of man and beast, huge across the shoulders with a beast’s face, every bit the creature of nightmares that the crowds had come to see.

His skin and fur were scorched where Stiles knew he’d been electrocuted, tortured to rile him up before the fight, to turn him half-rabid. His eyes glowed red. He lurched onto all-fours and shot straight for Stiles, fangs obvious in his gaping maw. Blood flecked his mouth and Stiles knew he’d bitten himself while they’d tortured him, his fangs clenched together and digging into his gums as he writhed in the effects of the electricity.

The beast slammed into the bars where Stiles stood, scrabbling, clawing, crashing into the gate over and over in a blind frenzy. Stiles didn’t flinch. He didn’t try to reach out to the poor creature either though, because when he did, they shot arrows, stabbed at the creature through the bars to make him back away. They didn’t want Stiles to calm him, not yet anyway.

His eyes glowed a foreboding crimson, but even as they stared out from a feral, twisted face, Stiles knew they recognised him. They always did.

“Peter,” Stiles murmured softly, for the creature’s ears only. “It’s okay, do what you have to do.”

Peter stopped.

Then, suddenly, the gate to the right side of the arena opened. A familiar, echoing voice called out over the crowds. “A challenger for _The Beast_. For our undefeated champion.”

The crowds cheered.

Stiles knew their game. That was the greatest torture of being trapped here, he knew exactly what to expect. They had ripped him away from their cell that morning, they had tortured Peter to the point of feral madness, riled him up, then let him glimpse a captive Stiles as an incensed up beast before releasing the opposition. It was all a trick to make him think he had to protect Stiles from the competitor.

It’d become necessary since Peter’s initial attempts at refusing to fight at all, or to fight in the least ‘entertaining’ way possible, as well as his many other clever tactics. Like this, Peter lost his mind, lost his calculating, quick thought process. All he could think of now was destroying the threat and protecting his only constant comfort and companion.

If he lost, they would both die.

The competitor was another alpha wolf, feral and mindless. Stiles knew it hurt Peter most when he fought his own kind, as opposed to some of the exotic beasts they found for him.

It was over before it really started.

Peter whirled on his unnaturally elongated haunches, lunging for the humanoid looking alpha and slamming her to the floor. Her screams filled the arena, echoing through the stone until Stiles shivered where he stood. Her bare feet were clawed like her hands, digging hard into Peter’s body, gouging, scraping, tearing, painting the air and the sand dark with blood.

She sank her claws into his neck and Peter roared but didn’t stop. His powerful arms swiped at her with unrivalled savagery, tearing her to pieces. When she clawed desperately at his face he flinched back on instinct to protect his eyes, leaving four slashes across his face. He shook himself off, the pain, the blood, all of it, as she staggered to her feet.

Stiles looked away. In rising unsteadily to her feet, she had unwittingly put herself between him and Stiles. That, perhaps luckily, sealed her fate sooner rather than later. Peter sank his own claws into her throat and tore it out, with cries of “Hale”, applause and raucous shouts breaking the air like war drums of their own.

Behind Stiles, the guards readied their shields, the ones decorated with wolfsbane infused spikes. Peter ran, like the frenzied, caged beast he was, in laps around the cage. Blood streamed down his wounded face and torso, but as he came to stand in front of the gates, in front of Stiles once more, he froze.

Stiles stepped forward, reaching his arms out through the bars, palms up, like one might placate a skittish pup and though he kept low to the ground, Peter crept towards him. He arched up, almost cat-like so Stiles’s fingertips _just _brushed his head, his neck and he let out a sorrowful, pained whine.

“You’re okay now,” Stiles murmured. “Come back, okay? I’m safe.” It was his way of assuring Peter that even when he came back to himself later, he had nothing to feel guilty about. He’d done the best he could do, Stiles knew that. He’d ensured they’d both live for another day.

The crowd was still cheering as the gates lifted and Peter dove inside, seizing hold of Stiles and nuzzling, nipping, licking at every inch of Stiles he could reach. And Stiles looped his arms up and around Peter’s shoulders, even though he had to stretch up to do so, even though he was covered in blood.

“Sshh,” he soothed, edging backward, pressing his face up just into the side of Peter’s furry neck so he could scent Stiles’s shoulder. Peter followed Stiles as he edged back along the wide tunnel behind them. When they’d gone a few feet, the gate screeched shut down behind Peter and he whipped around, snapping at the sudden noise. Stiles reached for him, catching hold of his terrifying, grotesque head, turning it back toward him, all teeth and blood and menace

“It’s okay. Come on, come back now. I’m right here.” His voice was low, gentle, almost husky, like a private secret just for Peter.

He stared hard at Stiles with those blood red eyes, chest heaving from exertion for a long time, before finally the fur, the wildness started to recede from his features. His body almost rippled like it was coming back to itself, leaving Stiles able to get his arms fully around his more human shaped shoulders, press his nose into smooth skin, until at last Peter’s more human breathing shuddered in his ear.

The shields closed in like the shield walls from ancient history around them, driving them back down the tunnel. Many times they’d tried to find a weakness in it, fought to break free, but each time they had both been beaten down worse than the last. There was no out, at least not this way, not that they’d ever found in the time they’d been here.

They were guided back into a sterile cell, with grey tiled walls and bars that vibrated ominously with power of electricity. It was large, illuminated by flat ceiling lights and not windows. Sparsely furnished with a bed and chairs, a toilet tucked into the corner and a sink, it provided the essentials but it was still every inch a prison. When the door sealed, the mountain ash line was reconnected and that sealed their only route of escape.

The guards called them ‘stables’ which spoke volumes about their place here. Peter was their prized bull, a fighting dog and Stiles? He wouldn’t even be alive if it weren’t for the indisputable connection that had sparked between them when he and Peter had first met.

Stiles spared no thought for the guards loitering outside the cage, paying them any mind only gave them what they wanted. Instead he urged Peter over to the desk, where a bowl of water and towels already sat.

So began their routine.

Stiles spoke softly, constantly, for Peter’s ears only as he dipped the hand towel into the water and dabbed at the gouges in Peter’s sides first. They would take a while to heal, made by an alpha, even if Peter was an alpha himself. Peter didn’t relinquish contact with him the entire time. His fingers ghostedg through Stiles’s hair, across his cheeks, his shoulders, his arms in brief but constant touches, as if he weren’t quite grounded yet and was worried he would float away.

“You’re okay, big guy,” Stiles said gently as he brought the cloth to the bloodied water once more and rinsed. He raised the cloth to Peter’s face and saw bright crimson eyes still watching him through the mess of healing scratches. Peter looked like himself but the beast was still riled up behind his eyes, so close to feral. Stiles knew he would be for some time yet. He always was.

His touches smeared blood over Stiles’s skin and hair but Stiles didn’t flinch. He knew what their captors called Stiles, none of the names complimentary, but Peter called him his anchor. And over the last year or so, he’d come to realise intimately what that meant.

His knowledge of werewolves and their traditions, their beliefs or instincts had been hard-earned by experience, not taught. He’d been bitten young. Despite the prejudice against werewolves among the rich and privileged, the lower classes worked and lived among them as readily as other humans. When he’d been struck down by a deadly fever as a child along with his mother, his father had sought an alpha to bestow the bite on them both to give them a fighting chance.

It was a common practice among those who couldn’t afford medical care and although it’d been too late to save his mother, it’d saved him. He’d been raised by his dad though, with no guidance on werewolf traditions or knowledge and while he’d managed to find out much from werewolf tradesmen passing through the village, there was much he hadn’t learned until he’d been snatched up by the Argents and brought here. Until he’d survived encounters with a variety of strange, otherworldly beasts, until he’d met Peter.

When Peter was cleaned, Stiles shrugged off his own threadbare tunic, ignoring the silent onlookers and washed the blood away from his body perfunctorily. In the early days the guards had liked to taunt both him and Peter in their weakest moment, violate their slender privacy, but neither of them much cared now. Ignoring them was the greatest rebellion and besides which, he thought that these days, the way the guards lingered was more down to their curiosity of the calmness Stiles inspired in Peter than anything else.

They had brought him here to do the job, but he didn’t think even they’d anticipated how well he would perform the task. It was unprecedented, how Peter recognised Stiles even in this state, when he likely didn’t even know his own name, how he allowed Stiles to ease him onto the bed.

They’d separated him from the other handful of wolves they’d gathered on their march through the southern territory. It’d been obvious to them, hunters who’d spent their whole lives killing or trapping the supernatural, that the beta and alpha wolves had instinctively gathered around him in the holding pens, however subtly. They had singled him out, put him with the handful of other omega wolves to be used as _‘pets’ _to calm their supernatural fighters.

There had been an old alpha who’d lived in the village when he’d been very small, dying slowly from delayed aconite poisoning. Before he’d died, it’d been from him that Stiles had learned what an omega wolf was, what that would mean when he was older. To the monsters who ran the arena, who had stolen him from his home though? To them it meant something different entirely.

To them, an omega’s innate soothing nature made them perfect for use as _‘_calming omegas_’_ for their riled up ‘fighting dogs’. But they hadn’t anticipated the way Stiles had seen the man behind the eyes of the feral beast they’d created, dangerous, but also clever and droll and capable of such tenderness.

They hadn’t counted on them protecting each other, caring for each other.

Some days Peter joked dryly that it was like _he_ was the pet, not Stiles. But really, it was neither. The prison kept them together, but their camaraderie, the spark between them kept them united against whatever came next. Good or bad.

Strange, how it was possible to find something so rare and beautiful in the midst of chaos and darkness.

Peter made a growl of protest when Stiles stepped back from the bed, but Stiles ignored him, simply grabbing the coarse blanket from the end and wrapping it around himself before letting Peter pull him down to lay beside him. He went over Stiles again with a fine-toothed comb almost, sniffing, scenting him from top to toe until eventually he curled against him.

Stiles stroked the forearm that was thrown over him soothingly, tilted his head to encourage the little nips at his nape that never drew blood. Their audience had dispersed now, to his relief. Peter never found sleep when the guards were close and with all the healing he had to do, his body desperately needed it. “Sleep,” Stiles urged him gently. “I’ve got you, okay?”

Funny, how those words seemed to soothe Peter most, since Stiles couldn’t do much physically to protect him. He could protect his mind though, which was perhaps more important.

Eventually, exhaustion took Peter and his restless caresses stilled. For Stiles, sleep was longer in coming.

*

Peter liked to remind Stiles that even though he was the alpha, in both species and gender, Stiles was the most powerful one here. Every time they opened up the _‘stable’ _for Stiles, he was reminded of how right he was.

The guards that had once jeered and tormented him from the second they’d snatched him from his village now scarcely spoke to him, never touched him, let alone stared at him. These days, he earned their curious glances and nothing more. He was the one that had the power to calm the most dangerous prisoner they held. Peter might not be able to escape but he could have done some damage in an attempt to. They never forgot their fear of him, they never forgot what he was capable of and so were equally wary of Stiles.

He’d acted as a calming omega to other supernatural beings here before he’d met Peter, used as a pet to soothe the savage beasts held captive between fights. Not just wolves but other creatures too. They had never lasted longer than a few nights, with Stiles sitting scared in the corner of their pens. None of them had done much more than look at him, but some had found his nervous chatter calming if not his presence, the knowledge that they weren’t alone.

He’d been dragged from one cage to the next, knowing the creature he soothed would most likely die the next day, if they didn’t kill Stiles in a feral stupor first. Then one day, they had shoved him into Peter’s stable, Stiles battered and bruised from the night he’d spent _failing _to calm a manticore that had thrashed in an attempt at escape and had caught Stiles in the process.

So the first time he’d met Peter he had been certain that this ravenous alpha would be his last cellmate. The guards had taken great pleasure in making him aware of how dangerous he was, how he’d tear him apart. Only Peter had been sitting on the bed, calm and composed when he’d stumbled into the stable. Their eyes had met silently and everything had changed.

So where he’d once feared stepping out of the ‘_stable block’_ to perform the duties he’d been assigned in keeping him and Peter alive, their living space clean, he knew they couldn’t touch him now. They had once accosted Stiles coming out of the shower and Stiles had heard the roar shaking the building all the way from the shower stalls.

Now he showered quickly, his skin oddly sensitive and tender, like the way it felt before he got a cold. He winced, that was the last thing he needed. But he felt a bone-deep ache running through him that felt like a warning to take it easy that could not be ignored.

Sighing, he dried hastily, noting that the skittish guards at the entrance to the shower didn’t even look at him as he passed. He grabbed one of the tunics off the neatly folded stack inside the communal linens room, pulled it on, then dug out fresh bedding and clothing for Peter.

While he and the other omegas had to keep the stables clean, bring dirty bowls or clothing to and from there, their companions remained trapped in the cell. It was even Stiles’s duty to bring bowls of water for Peter, usually, so he could wash inside his prison. He was not allowed to leave, even to bathe. Only to fight.

The only thing they didn’t do was prepare or bring the food. That would be sitting outside the cell when he returned as always and he’d bring it inside, with the guards currently watching him and the other omegas on task at his back, the guards armed to the teeth always.

With his arms heavy with sheets and clothing, Stiles brushed passed them without even glancing at them, heading toward the cell. Three broke from the regiment against the wall and followed him, extra security for their most dangerous captive, but he wasn’t even halfway down the stark white, sterile corridor before a cold voice stopped him dead in his tracks.

“Keeping my best fighter in good shape I hope, Stiles?”

Stiles didn’t turn his head, didn’t move, just stared straight ahead, waiting. The man approached from behind and circled around to stand right in front of Stiles. A wicked grin crept across his lined face as he surveyed Stiles carefully.

“The guards tell me he _told _them to fetch another blanket for his omega,” Gerard said neutrally.

Inwardly, Stiles flinched, remembering Peter waking this morning, and rather than focussing on his own still healing injuries, he’d noticed the unnatural flush to Stiles’s skin, the chill he felt even though his temperature was elevated. He’d grimaced then at the order Peter had barked at the guards, seen the dangerous look that accompanied the order. His eyes had bled to red and he’d kept hold of Stiles as long as possible as he’d risen, as if warning the guards at the door that he’d hold them personally responsible if anything happened to Stiles.

They’d warily hedged that they’d have to clear his request with the governor but he hadn’t thought Gerard would take the time to haunt him over such a trifle.

“I think I’m coming down with something and winter isn’t far off, he’s just protective,” Stiles said carefully, staring the man down. He wasn’t afraid. His dad had taught him to stand up for himself, even in these dark times and besides which, he knew Peter brought Gerard in a lot of money.

_ “If I win, he’s mine and I want him whole, unmolested and in relevant comfort,” _Peter had said the morning after Stiles had been given to him, when Gerard had come to the stable. He’d seemed surprised Stiles was still in one piece and that Peter was so lucid.

_ “You could’ve asked for anything, tried to bargain for your freedom but all you ask for is this boy?” _Gerard had been sneering, derisive even then, but he’d agreed and Peter hadn’t lost a fight since. Not in the year he and Stiles had been boarded together.

Gerard was an unhinged tyrant but he wasn’t a fool. Peter was a calculated risk, one that they’d been able to manage as a feral alpha but with his mind intact, he could only be harnessed with Stiles’s life in the dangerous game of balance they played. A Peter who could think for himself was more dangerous than a mindless beast. They needed leverage to control him.

Slowly, Gerard reached out and tugged at the collar of the tunic Stiles wore. It was done in the same way a man might move when straightening out his protégé’s shirt, but Stiles knew it was only a display of how much power he had, his subtle assertion that Stiles was helpless to pull away despite what power Peter claimed he had in this place.

He flinched, he couldn’t help it but when Gerard smirked at him he didn’t look away.

“I know Hale thinks he’s got me by the balls but he’d do well to remember that at some point, catching myself a new alpha would be less costly than keeping him in line,” Gerard said darkly.

“But not a Hale that the public would pay big money to see,” Stiles countered. The Hales were few now and scattered, in hiding with their alpha in captivity, but they were still the most powerful pack out there. And they were out there somewhere.

Gerard’s face twisted at Stiles’s daring and he released him with a little shove. Stiles could see the desire to throttle him clear in his face though and knew a small victory, a small rush of power. For the moment, at least, he was untouchable.

“This isn’t what I intended,” Gerard managed through his teeth. “But it doesn’t matter because Hale fights and fights well. People pay to see him fight like a kept dog, all pride and intelligence stripped from him. He debases himself like a beast for my benefit and with him here, I hold the entire species in the palm of my hand.”

He stared hard at Stiles. “You’re the key to all of that, Stiles, the way _I _decide your life goes is the key to that. So your keeper can ask for extra blankets and better food, but I want you to remember that the only reason he’s asking for all that is because _I _gave you to him, as a pet to make him jump through _my_ hoops.”

The raw nerve he’d struck must’ve shown in Stiles’s expression because Gerard looked suddenly pleased with himself. “Do you know where we got the idea of a calming omega, Stiles? In some places, where bulls are brought in to the bull fighting pits, they put them with a smaller, gentler beast to settle them before their big fight – a pig, a goat, a sheep. That’s all you are, Stiles, you’re the little goat, the sheep that sleeps beside the wolf, never knowing when it’ll turn and devour him. Don’t forget your place.”

Stiles shook with rage and hurt at once, curled his hands tight around the bundle in his arms. With his mind, he peeled Gerard’s withered flesh from his bones inch by painful inch but in reality, he was frozen.

_“Do you know why they use you as companions for creatures like me?” _Peter had asked him that first night, as he’d knelt on Stiles’s level and reached for his hand._ “Omegas have an innate scent or presence, one that calms any species. Your nurturing disposition emanates from you, makes us all feel safe. That may have condemned you to this place, it might mean that you can’t take down everyone who wrongs you, but it does not mean you’re powerless.”_

He felt achy and shuddery though, vulnerable with Gerard goading him here and the guards at his back. In the only slither of control he had, he moved passed Gerard as if he didn’t matter. He felt the guards follow him as usual, but didn’t turn to look back as he made his way toward the ‘stable block’ where the reinforced rooms, the _cells_ of all the competitors were.

Peter’s eyes flicked up from the book he’d been allowed, always red when anyone other than Stiles drew near. The rest of his body remained ominously still as he watched the guard put a knife to Stiles’s neck as always, a warning to Peter to behave, even if the guard wielding it shook at the look Peter gave him.

With his limpet attached to him, Stiles set the clean bedding and clothing on the side, before bringing in the food just outside the cell door. The guard held onto Stiles while the other reset the line of mountain ash and then he shoved him away, nearly tripping over himself in his haste to hop over the line.

The cell door slammed after this and Stiles set out the food and water as Peter stared at the door, apparently waiting for the footsteps to recede down the corridor. Stiles knew when they were further enough away for Peter’s liking, because his eyes slowly bled back to blue and he set his book aside, his tense limbs relaxing somewhat at last.

As always, Stiles passed both plates, then the water to Peter, letting him sniff at them carefully before he took one of each for himself. They weren’t poisoned today either. They hadn’t ever been but they could never let their guard down.

“You still look flushed,” Peter noted, pressing the back of his hand to Stiles’s forehead. “You don’t smell ill though.”

Stiles snorted. “Good to know.” He tucked into the tasteless porridge distractedly. His stomach felt too small, like it’d shrunk while he’d slept but he kept eating, because even a year of being fed on routine hadn’t made him forget that they could withdraw that ‘luxury’ at any time. When he pushed the empty bowl onto the table, however, he found Peter watching him.

“You’re restless.”

“I’m always restless,” Stiles mused, but though their normal routine would have them both doing exercise shortly, Stiles’s limbs protested the very thought. Instead he watched Peter move to sit in the spot where the skylight far, far above let golden sunlight pool on the stone floor. It was the one time he got to feel the sun without an enemy at his back, Stiles supposed. He too calmed at the sight of Peter painted golden by the sun, sitting with his back against the wall, head tilted upward to enjoy the warmth.

Stiles followed the urge to be close to him, to feel his sun-warmed skin and lowered himself down onto the stone.

Without even opening his eyes or moving more than necessary, Peter pulled him in close and they curled up in the stream of sunlight, just feeling each other.

The little moments like these had kept them both sane in the last year or so, but more than that, had formed little bubbles of bliss in the otherwise lifeless routine of survival. Sandbanks of pure happiness in an ocean of darkness.

Stiles thought he might have drifted off at least once because he came back to himself with a little jerk, curled into Peter’s side and the warm, strong arms around him squeezed him reassuringly as he calmed. Burying his nose in Peter’s neck, Stiles exhaled. The sun had moved so that only their entangled feet lay in the golden rectangle of light but Stiles still felt overly warm.

“Do you ever think if we hadn’t been captured, and fate had ever brought you to my village, you’d have noticed me still?” Stiles asked, voice husky from sleep and the peacefulness Peter’s embrace brought.

“I think _not _noticing you would’ve been impossible,” Peter mused. “I would hear your constant chattering from a mile off.”

Stiles snorted, letting one of his ever-roaming hands come to rest over Peter’s chest. It would be winter soon and while they were kept alive and with the essentials to remain in relative good health, he wasn’t sure how he’d survive a winter in their stone prison. Like all omegas, he felt the cold and there was no fire like the one his dad kept going for him in their modest little house, or the warm woollen blankets, sleeves and socks that he’d had made for him.

There would be only so much Peter’s body heat could do for him when his breath began to crystallize in his lungs and escape as mist into the air of their stone cell.

“I think,” Peter began, breaking Stiles’s dangerous train of thought. “That just like here, I would’ve found it impossible not to be drawn to you.”

Stiles chewed his cheek. “Even without mountain ash, bars and stone keeping us together?”

Peter urged him back, so that Stiles was kneeling between his legs and stunning blue eyes that stole Stiles’s breath every time they fixed on him, even after all this time, studied his face carefully. “They assigned me two calming omegas before they assigned you to me,” he reminded Stiles. “Neither of them registered enough to have an effect on me, to stop me from tearing at my own skin in my feral state.”

He cupped Stiles’s face in his hands, as if only the contact could make him fully understand the gravity of what that meant.

“I would’ve been dead within weeks, were it not for you.”

Stiles swallowed. “You never…you never said, what it was about me, what made me any different from them.”

Tilting his head, Peter let the pad of one thumb caress Stiles’s cheek before his hands slid down Stiles’s arms to grasp his fingers loosely. “Because you were exactly the same as them, scared and hurt and yet instead of letting that rule you like they did, you were brave in spite of that. You approached me when I was clawing at myself like a rabid dog and you tried to help even though I could’ve torn you to pieces without even trying. That kind of reckless bravery, selfless care, it made the whole world stop, long enough to remember how to come back to myself.”

Peter’s lips quirked then. “And when I did come back to myself, it certainly helped that I had someone to carry out intelligent conversation with.”

“And he was pretty hot to boot,” Stiles added lightly.

“Like burning,” Peter murmured, leaning forward. Like every other time they’d kissed, he hesitated a hairsbreadth away, giving Stiles the chance to back away, before bringing their mouths together. Like always, it started feather light, just a brush of lips. Sometimes it would deepen into more intimate contact, but sometimes, like now, it was just an assurance of their connection, of the things they felt but never said with words.

Peter stood and looked at the skylight so far beyond reach with a sigh and moved to the piles of fabric Stiles had brought in earlier. He changed the sheets and then tossed the old ones at the solid cell door, before moving to pull on one of the tunics Stiles had brought for him. Stiles watched him dress with admiration, affection and so much more.

“So you’d still pick me, in another place, another time–”

“Every time.”

Peter’s eyes and tone left no room for misunderstanding.

Feeling an odd swell of emotion in his throat, Stiles nodded again and moved their dirty breakfast bowls over to the door. When he rose from setting them down, he felt Peter’s arms wrap around him from behind, felt him nuzzle subtly at his ear, his cheek.

“I will get you out of here, Stiles,” he promised in a barely there whisper.

Stiles just nodded, because he knew Peter would smell the lie on him if he tried to claim he believed escape was even a possibility anymore.

At least he knew whatever fate was laid out for them, they would face it together.

*

After almost a week of feeling like he was on the cusp of illness, Stiles woke up on fire. He felt dizzy even though he was lying down, shuddery. He was so hot he felt sweat soaking through his clothes. He kicked the blankets off in his frenzy, tore at his tunic but then strong hands stilled him. He writhed against them with a raging fever, almost delirious with it.

The familiar hands helped to pull the clothes of him, soaked his tunic in the sink and smoothed the wet fabric across his brow, his chest, letting blissful icy coolness slice right through the madness. Combined with the soft, soothing pressure of a palm against his brow, fingers smoothing across his damp hairline, it helped to cut through the blinding inferno, enough for him to make out Peter’s face hovering over his.

“Peter,” he managed hoarsely and Peter’s face twisted with concern. He stopped stroking Stiles’s forehead long enough to fetch him a cup of water from the sink and bring it to his lips, urging him to drink in slow sips.

“It’s alright, sweetheart,” Peter soothed. “It’s just hitting you harder because it’s your first.”

His first…?

Stiles groaned. “_No_…”

“It’s alright–”

“Stop _saying _that!” Stiles gasped, “it’s not alright. It can’t be I…I _can’t_, not here–”

“Ssssh.” Peter pressed the cup to his lips once more, urging him to finish the water. As Stiles swallowed, Peter stroked his brow once more. “We won’t. It’s not like the humans like to make everyone believe. We aren’t animals that fornicate regardless of the situation. You’d know that if your mind weren’t fried by the fever.”

Stiles shook his head when Peter tried to offer him more water. “I don’t want to beg for you to fuck me,” he managed. “They’ll see, they’ll hear, I don’t…not like that, not with them watch–”

“I would never touch you unless you wanted it and you won’t be mindless with it. That’s not how it works. It’s not hormone induced rape. It doesn’t make you want something you wouldn’t otherwise want. If you don’t want me to touch you, you won’t ask me. You _know _this. Stay calm, think.”

Stiles licked his lips and tried to remember how to breathe. He was so hot.

The damp fabric was back, dabbing at his neck and face and it felt so good he nearly swooned. Everything felt sensitive, and his hole felt damp with slick but he didn’t feel like screaming for Peter to fill him. He blinked steadily in the darkness. He could just make out Peter’s face and slowly, bit by bit, he remembered himself, his awareness of self and body.

It wasn’t like the stories the humans liked to spin. He wouldn’t be a mindless sex doll for any passing alpha with a knot.

Peter must have guessed his coherency had returned somewhat from his expression because he said softly, “the guards have reported to Gerard. It’s unprecedented. In the years places like these have been using calming omegas, they’ve never experienced an omega in heat in captivity.”

Stiles nodded, even as the constant tide of heat roared in his ears, ebbing and flowing with his pulse. He felt queasy. Omega fertility was a fragile thing. They didn’t start having heats until full maturity between eighteen or twenty-one, depending on their bodies. They didn’t go into heats if their bodies weren’t strong enough, if they weren’t fed or if they didn’t drink enough. If they were under stress, or didn’t feel safe. Half the reasons they felt the cold so keenly was because temperature and climate was a key part of telling their bodies when it was safe to procreate.

It was the norm in stressful situations like this, for omegas to miss heats if their situation wasn’t ideal, even the humans knew it. Stiles had known it, even though in his quiet little village, he never would’ve dreamed of being one of the poor omegas captured and dragged into servitude to the human fighting arenas. He hadn’t questioned it when his first heat had never come, even though he was of age.

But it was here now. Because of Peter. Because in spite of the nightmare that was their daily lives, Peter made him feel safe.

With weak arms, he reached up to stroke Peter’s chest. “If we were…if we were anywhere else,” he began, but Peter caught his wrist and lifted his hand up to press his lips to Stiles’s fingers.

“I know,” he assured him, letting Stiles’s fingers touch his cheek.

If they were anywhere else, Stiles would ask him, Stiles wouldn’t have to ask and they would do this properly. They could be what they were meant to be for each other.

Feeling overcome with emotion, Stiles felt something thick lodge in his throat. “I wish it could be like it should, I wish I…I wanted it to feel real.”

Peter smiled softly, leaning in to brush his lips across Stiles’s forehead. “It doesn’t have to be sex to be real,” he breathed, drawing back to soak the fabric in the bowl beside the bed. Stiles wondered if he’d asked the guards to bring him a bowl before they’d sped off to report to Gerard but there was no one currently watching through the slots in the door that he could see. Maybe the bowl might’ve been from that morning’s wash, just rinsed and refilled in the tiny sink in the corner by the toilet.

It felt glorious on his overheated skin and he let his eyes fall closed as the cramps throbbed ominously in his belly, his womb descending, waiting to be fertilised.

_Not today, _he told his body, even as the heat waves that his oestrus was named for swept back over him again, swallowing him up with delirium.

“I’ve got you,” Peter murmured, sounding so far away, even as his hands on Stiles’s brow, chest and belly assured him he was close.

“Mn’know.” Stiles felt everything pulse in warning with the cramps and heat, like the rhythm of the drums that plagued his dreams. His body was pushing everything inside him out of place, ready for conception and drawing blood down to his sensitive places that, in any other situation would hunger for Peter’s touch. If they were alone, if things were different. As it was, Peter was still there, Peter touched him for comfort rather than sex and in that moment, that felt like the best thing on earth.

Even through the din, he knew this was perhaps a more special kind of assurance than even a lover being inside you could be.

“Feel safe with you, that’s why I…that’s why…”

“I’m honoured,” Peter assured him, stroking his stomach in slow, soothing circles, alpha pheromones rushing into Stiles’s lungs with every breath and easing the fever.

*

It seemed to go on for days. He swore through the raging hurricane of fire consuming him that he heard the guards come ago, heard Peter protesting he couldn’t move, not even to keep to their ‘routines’ and perform his ‘duties’. He thought he might even have heard Gerard’s ominous voice once but if he did, it was nothing more than echoes that never really registered in him.

Peter never left him. Peter was almost always touching him. Peter made him safe.

The rush of endorphins that sex would bring and an alpha’s seed would quench the hormonal heat wave of course but with that option out, he was surviving better than he’d anticipated when it’d first hit.

He still had his lucid moments, during which Peter tried to make him eat and drink at least a little. It was in such a lucid moment, with the heat melting his organs, that he woke to find Peter spooned against his back. His hand slowly stroked across his stomach from behind, nails scratching gently through the hairs leading downward.

At some point Peter must’ve pulled their bedding onto the floor, because Stiles blinked at the moonlight bathing their nest underneath the skylight. It wasn’t in full tonight but it felt glorious on his skin. Soothing somehow. Turning in Peter’s arms, he rolled to face him, to meet blue eyes that shone darkly with the ethereal bluish light.

It was like a spell had swept over them, securing them away from the rest of the world, permitting them this quiet, gentle moment, a secluded intimacy. Sweet silence in the eye of the storm. The guards were absent from the hall outside, Stiles couldn’t hear them through the bars on their door. It was only them.

Searching Peter’s eyes, Stiles leaned in, brushing their lips together feather-light. He exhaled shakily at the way the tenderness of Peter’s answering mouth reached right down into his core and squeezed. Their mouths moved together, soundless but for the uptick in their breathing, the frantic thud of heartbeats that sped up as excitement and intimacy swelled.

Peter’s fingers came up to thread in Stiles’s hair, cup his nape to hold him close and Stiles’s hand slid down, caressing Peter’s chest, grasping the hardness pressing into his belly.

“We don’t have to,” Peter managed, even through his breathlessness, even though he kissed Stiles again as soon as the words were out, as if _he _were the one heat drunk.

“I know,” Stiles whispered against his lips, nuzzling in, giving Peter’s hardening cock a long, slow stroke. “That’s why I want to.” He felt Peter shudder in his hand and quickened the pace of his wrist, tightening the grip of his fingers. “It’s just us. I want to, please?”

The hand cupping Stiles’s neck slid down his back, inciting little bursts of fire along his flesh everywhere he touched, before cupping his ass. Stiles groaned in approval, arching against him under the privacy of solitude and the sheets. He pressed his cock against Peter’s thigh as he stroked Peter faster.

He’d messed around with others in the village before his capture, but his heat had every part of him flushed with sensitivity before they’d even begun. Peter’s lips drifted to the line of his jaw, the dip of his throat and Stiles was panting at the barely-there, teasing touches. Peter’s fingers slid into the cleft of his ass, where he was leaking wetly and he twisted his face to lock blunt teeth into Peter’s shoulder, muffling his own groan of appreciation.

He was on fire with need now. His stomach tightened with every little glancing caress of Peter’s tongue at his throat, every teasing, flicking little circle of his fingers against his clenching hole. Over and over, across the hot, leaking centre until Stiles was jerking forward, riding every touch. He held Peter tighter, mouthing, sucking as if that would soothe the surge of need inside him. Peter just panted greedily with it, licking and kissing his throat, the line where collarbone met shoulder, grinding into the strokes of Stiles’s wrist.

His cock was swelling at the base, hardening rapidly and as soon as Stiles touched the taut, tender flesh he gasped. That was new. Very new. Drawn out because of the way Stiles smelt right then, the way he felt. His hand stilled on instinct and Peter muffled a snarl of frustration into his neck.

“It’s just me,” he whispered, for his ears only as if in urgent reassurance. “Touch it.”

Stiles released Peter’s shoulder, exhaling shakily as he wrapped his fingers around the base of Peter’s cock, his knot. It hardened even as he did so and Stiles locked his fingers around it, cupping the swollen ball of velvet heat, squeezing, relaxing and squeezing his hand again, instinctively mimicking the motions of his own hole as Peter slid two fingers inside, dipping deep and drawing back to taunt the pliant ring of sensitive nerves, before pushing back in again.

Stiles gave Peter one long, firm stroke from swollen base to tip and then rolled onto his side, facing away from Peter again. He drew Peter between his legs where slick coated his thighs. When he looked down at his own swollen, neglected cock, he saw Peter’s tip already fucking the tight clench of his thighs. He panted at the sight of the darkened shaft disappearing and then pushing through with increasing urgency, couldn’t tear his eyes away at the image of it pushing up against the base of his own erection as he reached around to grasp the tight knot once more.

It was a tad awkward but all the more perfect for the clumsiness of it. His own cock slapped wetly against his belly with every thrust they made back and forward into each other, until Peter wrapped his fingers round it. It made his heart stutter even as the heat seemed to liquefy his organs with the intensity of the pleasure. Because really his cock didn’t matter, hadn’t mattered to anyone he’d fooled around with before, that wasn’t what omegas were for, after all. But it mattered to Peter, his pleasure mattered to Peter and it only made the orgasm building inside him spark with electric fire in his veins.

Every movement drew a thick line of sticky wetness from within him, clear fluid that oozed down to coat Peter’s cock from where it fucked his thighs. Stiles let out a quiet, startled groan when his own muscles started to spasm with it all.

“Peter,” he cried out warningly, watching his own cock drool to match his leaking hole.

Peter nuzzled frantically against his neck, biting gently, sucking, as if drunk on his scent. The hand that had been trapped under Stiles’s head covered his mouth just in time to stifle the groan of ecstasy that ripped through Stiles. He shook with uncontrollable, jerking spasms that only Peter’s hand and body prevented from carrying him right off the edge of their makeshift nest.

Stiles’s fingers tightened almost painfully around Peter’s knot and Peter drew in a sharp breath. He fucked into Stiles’s thighs hard, fast, even as he continued to stroke him. “Milk it,” he growled out against his nape, almost inaudibly quiet but no less urgent for it.

Stiles felt drunk, giddy, drugged, euphoric, his hand hadn’t stopped moving anyway. Even without Peter’s demand he fisted it hard, flexed around the tender flesh he could only _just_ reach round himself with the tangle of their sweaty, slick-covered limbs but then he smelt it, _felt _it. Peter’s orgasm spurting across the sheets and up across Stiles’s softening cock, his stomach, pulsing long and messily, never-ending in the stretch of afterglow that consumed everything.

Both breathing heavily, they continued to rut together, their motions, their thrusts slowing to a gentle, sensual rock until they stilled entirely. Stiles was so shattered from the release in combination with his heat that it took Peter gently prying his fingers away from his knot for him to let go.

“My good omega, so good, smell so good, so…”

Stiles relished in it all, drank in the sound of Peter’s soft voice, his gentle kisses and presence like air. Peter’s other hand drifted down from his mouth to stroke across his throat in a way that made him squirm with contentment.

“Feel empty,” he murmured quietly, not only drained but…_empty_, like his body knew he needed something more to perfect the moment. He felt empty and wet and soft down there and the sensation was odd.

“It’s the hormones,” Peter soothed, rolling Stiles around to face him again. He wrapped his arms and the cleaner edges of the blankets around them both, before sliding his fingers into him, curling them just inside to let him feel the stretch but not pressure his oversensitive prostate.

“Mmmm,” Stiles murmured in exhausted relief, closing his eyes and tucking his face into Peter’s chest. “Yeah that’s…that’s good, all good.” He squeezed down around him, just to feel it, felt held, felt pinned, treasured and safe wrapped up in the nest they’d made with their bodies and the sheets in the moonlight. “You’re so good.”

He felt the fever nip at the edges of his consciousness but thought that he just might pass out before it hit. Perhaps he’d sleep through the oncoming wave? He inhaled Peter’s scent. “Love you,” he whispered into the secret space between them.

Peter brushed his lips against his sweaty forehead. “I love you too, sweetheart.”

Stiles drifted.

*

Panic woke him with a sharp jolt. He was jerked upwards roughly and started at the sight of Peter jerking on the floor, as if in aftermath of an electric shock.

“You can’t move him,” Peter managed through clenched teeth, quivering with spasms even as he tried to push up onto his hands and knees. The guards dragged a limp, exhausted Stiles toward the cell door that stood open wide, framing Gerard Argent where he watched the commotion with a steely, unaffected expression.

“He’s in heat, you can’t touch him. He needs–”

“What your pet needs is not my priority, Hale. You have a fight scheduled and if you don’t get to it, I will shoot him where he stands.”

Peter gave a low, warning snarl.

The pressure of hard, unyielding fingers on Stiles’s oversensitive, raw flesh hurt like nothing he’d felt before. Like being flayed alive. He struggled with whatever strength he had left, crying out at the disproportional agony that ripped through him when a guard backhanded him. His heat heightened everything, so that a strike like that left him absolutely stunned.

Peter roared and surged forward, only to fly backwards, jerking grotesquely as Gerard shoved the cattle prod hard into his side. He twisted it there so that the current kept contact, until long after Peter went still. Stiles stared at his limp body in horror, and if he couldn’t hear his heartbeat, see his chest rising and falling erratically, he might think he were dead.

“Let this be a lesson of who is in charge here,” Gerard murmured darkly, jerking his head to two more guards, who to their credit, _did_ hesitate before reaching to drag Peter toward the door.

Stiles’s head swam as soon as Peter was out of sight and he staggered, weakly and disorientated after the guards who had hold of him. The further away Peter got, the worse Stiles felt. He gasped for breath that wouldn’t come. He felt panic pulsing through him, instincts screaming to flee even though there was no way to go. It felt like being suffocated to death in the smallest space. Everything hurt.

When they shoved him into the familiar tunnel leading down to the gate, he winced at the unnatural lights on his eyes and pulled the blanket they had at least tossed over him on their way out of the cell tighter round him.

He came to a halt unsteadily, listing sideways as a cramp ripped through his stomach deep and low. He felt dizzy with the wrongness of being out in the open, around enemies with his alpha and pack nowhere near. He struggled to keep a grip on reality, to keep himself upright. He thought Gerard was standing beside him, beside the men who still kept a painful hold on his oversensitive arms, too much even through the blanket. He thought maybe the gate across the arena opened, thought he heard Peter snarl but it was hard to identify what was really there as his world spun.

He couldn’t stand.

He stumbled into one of the men holding him upright.

“Fucking animal has pissed himself!” Snapped the guard when he caught sight of the slick trailing down Stiles’s legs. He swore and shoved Stiles away.

Stiles fell hard. He slammed into the bars, a gash splitting his forehead open as he tumbled to the floor. Stiles’s ears rang but when he looked out through bleary eyes into the dazzling grey light of day, he saw Peter’s grotesque silhouette stop dead. Then he flew forward.

A blood-curdling howl rented the air and Stiles’s body sang with it. He watched with detached, almost drugged disorientation as Peter wrapped his clawed, semi-shifted fingers round the bars. Eve Even as they burned Peter’s flesh, they groaned under the pressure of a deranged alpha wolf drunk on the heat pheromones of his mate and as they bent, Gerard’s smug expression dropped from his face.

Gerard only had time to take one step back before Peter swiped at his throat through the warped metal. Claws dug into his flesh and yanked him forward by his neck, hauling him hard into the bars with such force that his neck snapped. He dropped limp to the ground, lifeless and staring when Peter released him, face permanently frozen in one of abject shock.

Somehow, an alpha werewolf had bonded with the omega they’d tried to use to control him. Somehow an alpha werewolf had defied all logic and broken through bars infused with mountain ash and _more _through sheer force of will. Somehow Gerard Argent, who had spent his life hunting werewolves had been undone, all by underestimating the strength of a werewolf’s instinct to protect.

Everything fell silent. Then one howl pierced the din, then another, then another. The stands echoed with the song of wolves and everything exploded into movement.

Pushing himself sideways so he was propped against the wall, Stiles tried to stop the ringing in his head, the way everything swayed and jerked in nauseating double-vision. He reached toward the bars as if a grip on them would steady him.

“Free the others!”

“Kill the Argents!”

“Move! Peter, move!”

Who had said that last? Who here called Peter by name except him?

Stiles tried to blink away the pounding in his skull. He gritted his teeth, trying to pull himself up.

“Omega, let go – _let go_!”

Stiles frowned. What?

He soon realised the necessity of the warning. The bars he’d been using to try and pull himself up on were jerked forward and he followed them, spilling out onto the sand.

Carnage was everywhere. He saw the swaying vision of fighters, supernatural creatures of all shapes and sizes pouring into the ring from the open gates at all sides, saw humans fleeing from the stands as more leapt down into the sand. Three figures hunched over him and he snarled, swiping out, _just _missing the slender shape of a female as she reached for him.

“It’s okay, Peter,” an unfamiliar male voice soothed as the blur that was Peter surged to Stiles’s side. “We won’t touch your omega. But let’s get him out of here.”

Stiles squinted hard. His skull groaned with the effort. The last thing he saw was Peter’s face shifting back as he stared down at him, eyes glowing as red as the blood painting the stands. Then everything faded.

*

Everything was dark when Stiles awoke, and yet his mind felt clearer than ever. His skin no longer felt so raw that the very air was too abrasive for it, even as a little chill chased goosebumps along his arms and neck. He blinked a few times and when he rolled onto his back he found himself staring up at a dark canopy of trees.

Trees above him and warm soft leaves around him.

He turned his head to see thin tendrils of smoke and flickering firelight rising subtly up to greet the sky. Then he exhaled shakily as it threatened to overwhelm him.

It was so far and away from the stony, sterile world he’d been trapped in for the last year. The smell of warm earth and wilderness and _wolves _filled his nostrils. He turned all the way over onto the opposite side to which he’d awoken, finding himself staring at a small campfire and a cluster of men and women gathered around it. They were talking and laughing quietly, busy with food and drink. They hadn’t seemed to have noticed him yet.

He studied them for a long moment, curled his fingers in the leaves beside his head and just let the night breeze tickle his hair, even as he pulled the blanket wrapped around him tighter to stave off the chill. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d felt the breeze on his face apart from the moments he spent moving between the stable block and the arena.

The arena…

He pushed up into a sitting position, feeling shaky but otherwise very much like himself. His heat must’ve broken while he was out then. And he’d been really out of it, enough to only remember snatches of what had happened. He still felt the wooziness exhaustion brought but otherwise managed to piece it together just fine. A werewolf pack had stormed the arena, had set everyone loose and Peter, his feral state had been intensified by Stiles’s heat pheromones.

He’d killed Gerard.

Stiles reached up to touch his forehead but it had healed while he slept. His mind raced. His heart thudded wildly as he struggled to make sense of things that he hadn’t imagined possible.

Gerard was dead and they were free.

He let his gaze fall half-heartedly from the subtle vitality gathered around the fire to where his bare toes were digging into the earth. He wiggled them. His eyes stung and his breath caught. He covered his mouth instinctively to stifle the sounded that wanted to break free from his chest, the tight, strained, disbelieving sound of emotion.

“Stiles.”

His head snapped up and Stiles stared at the familiar and yet different sight of Peter. He had two wooden bowls in hand. He was dressed in casual trousers and a shirt that was so comfortable looking, so normal compared to the stark, itchy tunics they’d been forced into, on the occasions Peter had been granted clothing at all.

He was silhouetted against the warm firelight, the orange glow _just_ catching his features. He looked clean, hair still damp and his eyes soft as he regarded him. Apparently he saw something in Stiles’s expression, or perhaps otherwise sensed it, because he lowered himself silently to sit beside Stiles, setting the bowls down on the ground and smoothing Stiles’s hair back from his forehead.

“How are things in there?” he asked quietly.

Stiles gave a small huff of a laugh.

“Busy, as always.”

“Mmm.” Settling down more fully beside him, Peter nudged a bowl toward him. “Eat up. Derek is a fairly good cook; he can make something out of anything.”

Stiles blinked, even as he took the bowl. “Derek? As in Derek your–”

“My nephew, yes.” Peter tipped the bowl toward his lips, drinking some of the stew even as he kept his eyes on the fire. “You don’t remember?”

He remembered the sound of Gerard’s neck snapping, remembered the bars being pulled out so he tumbled onto the sand, remembered two people talking to Peter like he was the most important thing amidst the chaos. He remembered too, the snippets of Peter’s life he’d learned from the quiet nights talking alone in the dark, their united penchant for talking the only thing that had kept them both sane in their confinement.

“Cora and Derek, they came for you.”

“My pack came for us, or what was left of it.” Peter gestured to the group of twelve at the fireside. Although it was a decent enough number in a world that put humans and supernatural against each other, with heavy losses on both sides, it was a radial loss from the time when the Hale pack had been the biggest pack on the continent. Back in the war, when Talia had been alpha.

When Talia Hale had fallen, the pack had been nearly decimated. Then, years later, Gerard had taken the new alpha, her brother Peter, to try and finish the job of obliterating her line and send a warning to other supernaturals everywhere. In the darkest nights, Peter had confided that he feared the pack had been killed off while they were scattered but here they were. They’d come.

“There were other wolves too, in the attack on the arena, other supernaturals who came together to rebel against people like Argent,” Peter continued, setting his now empty bowl aside and reaching out, instinctively resting his hand on Stiles’s thigh. “They tore it apart. All of it.”

Stiles looked down at the bowl in his grasp, felt the rich scent make his mouth water. Real food. His stomach grumbled but his throat tightened too much for him to even think of swallowing. “They’re really gone,” he breathed out quietly.

Peter squeezed his thigh. “We’re free, Stiles,” he assured him, perhaps as much to reassure himself as Stiles, as if he couldn’t quite believe it either.

Stiles nodded, swallowing thickly, before bringing the bowl to his lips. His tongue sang with the rich, salty-sweetness of the broth, the vegetables, the rabbit. His stomach growled in appreciation and he savoured every swallow. It wasn’t until he set the bowl down that he realised tears were streaking down his cheeks.

Staring ahead at the fireside, the company of wolves gathered there, he tipped his head onto Peter’s shoulder, rubbed the tears from his cheek there and just breathed.

After a moment, Peter’s arm looped loosely around his side, holding the blanket tighter round him.

They were free.

“So what happens now?” he asked quietly once the swell of emotion had calmed and he found himself again amongst the overwhelming relief of it all.

Peter twisted his head just enough to inhale Stiles’s hair, letting his mouth rest on Stiles’s head like a long, lingering kiss. “First, we get you some clothes. Derek’s clothes should fit you just fine.”

Stiles swallowed again. “And…your pack?”

Peter tsked and drew back. When he did, Stiles lifted his gaze to meet his, saw those perfect blue eyes alive with impatience, as if Stiles had missed something obvious.

“Our pack, if you still want it.”

_ “Would you still choose me?”_

_ “Every time.”_

Stiles smiled cautiously. “Well, I suppose someone needs to keep you in line.”

“We certainly need the help,” a voice called and Stiles looked up to see Derek approaching, a bundle of cloth in his hands. He gave Stiles an almost shy smile that belied his apparent strength and tossed him the clothing. “We’re about the same height. it should fit better than a blanket anyway.”

Stiles caught the shirt and trousers, staring at them for a moment, fingers moving thoughtfully over the fabric. It smelled of Derek of course, but also pack. The pack that had saved him, fed him, now clothed him. The pack that had welcomed him just like that, as if he already belonged to them.

“Thanks.”

Derek nodded, then half-turned back to the fire. “It’ll be warmer by the fire,” he offered diplomatically. It was a roundabout way of saying they wouldn’t bite, that he was welcome there.

Stiles nodded in answer, wriggling into the trousers. “Be right with you.”

It was almost like every tentative, half-hearted word dispelled the uncertainty from him, the lingering ghost of that dark place they’d been trapped in for so long. Maybe, eventually, it’d be nothing more than a bad dream, as if they’d never been there at all.

Peter watched Stiles as he dressed quickly. It was a cool night and the fire’s warmth only reached so far. They were both standing now and Stiles wrapped the blanket around his clothed shoulders again to stave off some of the chill he always felt so easily. He wondered what winter might hold for him this time. Would he be back home with his dad by then? Was that even on the cards?

As if Peter had read his mind, he asked quietly, not quite meeting his eyes, “do you remember the way home?”

Stiles hesitated. “We lived in _Beacon Hills_, in _Old California._” He licked his lips. “They…I mean they are pretty out of the way up there. Werewolf, human, it doesn’t really make a difference when everyone survives by helping each other out, you know? I mean there are some people who hold prejudice but…it’s changing every day.”

“It is,” Peter agreed thoughtfully, “in spite of people like Gerard.”

Changing for the better, Stiles thought, slowly but surely.

He studied Peter in the muted firelight for a long time, the comfort and strength he’d found in the darkest of places. The spark he’d found in the abyss that had made him want to hold on, find a way to some place better. Gerard Argent may have shoved them together, but the warmth he felt now at Peter’s side, it wasn’t because of that, it was in _spite _of it.

He slid his fingers down to grip Peter’s quietly, listening to the way the breeze riffled the leaves above them, the sound of life in every crevice of the forest around them. It was such a stark contrast to his stone prison that he felt like he was hearing and smelling things for the first time, like a child discovering the world all over again.

“I’ll help you find your father,” Peter promised softly, just like he’d done so many nights when they were curled up alone. But they were not alone anymore and now, at last, Stiles believed him. They were free. It might take him a while to realise that.

Stiles moistened his lips hesitantly. “And then after that?”

Peter’s eyes shone as they regarded him like he was the most wondrous thing he’d ever seen. “And then, whatever you want. Whatever _we_ want.”

Stiles tried for casual as he stared down again at where his toes were burrowing into the soft ground. “I think there might be room for a few more wolves in _Beacon Hills_, a place for the reunited Hale pack to call home.”

A long silence settled, Peter considering those gathered at the fireside with a wistful look on his usually blank face. He looked relaxed for the first time Stiles had known him and he looked so good, so soft and beautiful and young.

“Home,” Peter said thoughtfully, as if he were testing the word on his tongue. “That sounds like a dream from so very, very long ago.” He sounded as if he weren’t sure he knew how to _do _home, do safety after all this time.

A little reassuring smile twitched at the corners of Stiles’s lips, summoning Peter’s gaze back to him.

“It doesn’t have to be,” Stiles assured him.

The smile Peter gave in response was a small but glorious thing and Stiles felt the rhythm of his heart stutter at the sight of it. Peter’s heart beat steadily as he stared at him like he hung the moon, adoring even now and even though Stiles _knew _it wouldn’t all be as easy as they might hope, he already felt the sound of the arena’s battle drums begin to fade from his memory.

Together, they joined they pack by the fireside.

The End.


End file.
